Pennine Horizons Digital Archive

The Pennine Horizons Digital Archive is an ongoing project of Pennine Heritage at the Birchcliffe Centre in Hebden Bridge and is an amazing collection of images gathered over a number of years covering the Calder and her Valleys.

The Pennine Horizons Digital Archive (PHDA) archives exists to select, preserve and make accessible the photographic archival heritage of our community. At PHDA we recognise the research value of all photographs and oral history recordings relating to the Upper Calder Valleys and we are working to establish a living archive for the benefit of future generations.

Amongst the larger collections are photographs from the Co-operative Heritage Trust, Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Society, Todmorden Antiquarian Society, Hebden Bridge Local History Society, Alice Longstaff Collection, Hebden Bridge Camera Club, Calderdale MBC, to name but a few. This community digital archive also contains many smaller, important collections all of which are fully searchable.

We also hold 500+ oral history recordings, which were produced as a result of the Wild Rose, Pennine Heritage project in the early 1980’s. Now digitized, this ‘treasure trove’ of recordings is a wonderful resource to help explain the history of our area and also assists in the preservation of the local dialect.

The PHDA, accredited in 2012 by the West Yorkshire Archive Service, and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, it gives access to over 100 photographic collections deposited by members of the public, professional photographers, societies, businesses and local councils. For anyone interested in photographs of the upper Calder Valley and beyond, there are now over 39,000 images in the archive (December 2017), with over 20,000 to view on this website. All this has been achieved, thanks to a dedicated band of volunteers.